I know I’ve been AWOL for awhile, and I apologize. I’ve literally been so busy I barely had time to eat or sleep. I’ve been working with interactive agencies on good-sized corporate website renovations. I learned a lot and have come up with a productivity tool that’s very helpful in efficiently developing search engine optimized website content.

Website designers and information architects use wireframes, Iboards, navigation charts, and other tools to graphically depict websites under development. They are ways of determining what content goes where and how to funnel traffic through a site to a call to action/conversion point. (MUCH more on funneling traffic and conversions in future posts.)

This is hard to believe, but true. I’ve worked with five interactive agencies over the past three years. None of them have a tool that helps the copywriter/content developer organize web pages to match the wireframes, Iboards and other tools. I’ve been through quite a bit of training (both home schooled and professional) re writing for the web. None of that training has recommended or suggested a productivity tool for web copywriters. I Googled some terms and couldn’t find any mention online of such tools.

I can’t be the first person to ever do this, but I’ll take credit if no one else is claiming it. What I devised is fairly straightforward. It extends the tools the designers are using to the SEO copywriting realm.

I developed an outline or content template for every page on the site. Here’s how:

Theme: this is not so much a part of the tool as just a reminder to keep the ‘personality’ or the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) in mind while writing. I always develop a theme for each website I work on. Examples include “The Personal Touch” and “Content that Converts”. They can be articulated on the site, or may just be used to flavor the copy throughout.

Title: HTML page titles show up as the first line of clickable text in most search engine results. But, as with most website copy, it must serve two purposes. It must help garner good search engine rankings, but it must also be meaningful to the humans who read the results. It should contain some of the keywords developed for the page, and it must clearly communicate what the page is about. RELEVANT and USEFUL again.

Description: Google will grab a snippet of copy from the page to use as a description (the unbolded text that appears after the Title in search engine results) . You can’t control which snippet Google will take, but the algorithm will try to determine what the main keyphrase on the page is, and will grab the sentence that it appears in. So, the description should provide that snippet - the main keyphrase inside a sentence that is a benefit statement.

Purpose: Probably not the best label for this, but it’s what I’m using for now. This is the most useful piece of information about the page for the writer. It contains the main reason for the page - “Communicate the benefits of the XR600.” or “Segment prospects by industry.” or “Ask for the order.” And it contains the funnel information. The funnel is the path that a specific type of prospect is being led down as he is persuaded to convert (take a specific action). The secondary purpose of every page (except ‘call to action’ pages) is to get the prospect to click through to the next page. This provides the writer with the next page in the funnel. So he has the information needed to provide the reason in the copy to click forward.

Keyphrases: These are the results of keyword research. Sometimes the agency has an SEO specialist who develops these. Sometimes the writer performs the research. In either case, by listing them, the writer knows what keyphrases she needs to use in the Title, Description, Headline, Subheads and body copy. Typically there are three or four keyphrases and each should be used three or four times throughout the page.

The above framework makes the writing job much easier because website pages don’t exist in a vacuum. They are part of a flow (funnels) that navigate the prospect through the site to a conversion. For simple products and services that conversion can be a sale. For more complex products and services, it might be a download of a white paper, or a case study, or an ROI calculator, etc.

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